‘Is it mad to rip up a load of grass and use it as a pillow?’ Lucy asks, her hands on her hips, surveying the ground outside the tent. The stream is wide here, and deep, and rushes pleasantly past. It’s nice to hear a noise that isn’t them, or the relentless desert night-time winds.
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think Dad is doing?’ she asks suddenly.
‘I don’t know,’ Simone replies, looking wistfully into the darkening blue air, thinking about the news articles and press conferences.
What would she be doing? She knows she wouldn’t be talking to the media, but whatwouldshe be doing? If Damien had rescued their daughter but had sacrificed everything else? She tries to tell herself that she’d appreciate it, that she would respect his decision, that he got her back alive. But she knows that she’d be steaming mad. That he’d rescued Lucy but in doing so would be keeping Simone from her.
‘What would you do?’ Simone asks her daughter softly. ‘In his shoes.’
Lucy thinks about this for so long that Simone begins to wonder if she heard her.
Simone begins getting out the bag of vegetables and potatoes she brought. First, she gets a fire going easily, with sticks and matches and the same watchfulness that cooking requires, the sort of activity that is suited to busy minds, minds that need at least part of them to be absorbed by something else. With water now in abundance, she fills a pot and brings it to boil, watching the flames leap underneath it. And the smell. Smoked wood. The smell of England in January, of walks by country cottages with open fires, of real-ale pubs with fifteenth-century beams up above. A distinctive chalky, wintery smell. She wishes she could bottle it.
‘I’d come,’ Lucy says simply. And here they are, arrived at the topic that they have so far avoided with other tasks: survival, running, staying hidden. Sometimes traumas are so great it takes you several days to truly witness their fallout. ‘We can’t go to him.’
‘No.’
‘So I’d come and find us.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Otherwise,’ Lucy says, talking around the topic, delving into it using a different perspective, ‘I would never see my wife and kid again.’ She looks away at this, into the distance.
The sun has now long set, the stars are beginning to pop out, the sky a bruised purple. Simone wonders idly how often there are extreme weather events here. Storms or hurricanes or even vast numbers of tumbleweeds blowing in. She thinks about bears and snakes. She thinks about these things to avoid thinking about the real, true tragedy: a family torn in two. By Simone? By a kidnapper? She’s no longer sure.
‘Yeah,’ Simone says, choked up. Lucy doesn’t need to know anything yet. She knows too much, has seen too much, already.
‘I mean, wouldn’t you?’ Lucy presses.
‘Yeah, I would,’ she tells her daughter, then adds: ‘At any cost.’
The water is boiling, crystals forming quickly, and Simone is pleased and relieved to see them: salt. She didn’t expect much from a stream, thought she’d have to extract calcium first, but, no, here they are. Salt crystals and all the flavour they bring with them. She begins to pluck them out, carefully, burning her fingers, but she doesn’t mind. She lays them on paper towels to dry out, then takes some tin foil and wraps the potatoes in them.
They will take half an hour to cook.
‘This is nice,’ Lucy says, later. ‘Reminds me of another time.’
‘Home?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not really. A time before. When cooking was cooking.’ At this sentiment, she meets Simone’s gaze inthe gloaming. Simone can only see the whites of her eyes, the shape of her face. The rest Simone fills in from a hundred thousand memories.
‘When cooking was cooking,’ she says softly, thinking, privately,Well, what does this mean?But Lucy can’t be pressed. Simone simply waits.
‘I don’t mean the restaurant,’ she says. ‘I mean –’ she pauses – ‘what do I mean?’ And then she laughs. ‘When things were simpler,’ she says eventually, looking directly at Simone, and Simone is struck, suddenly, by the notion that perhaps her daughter is hiding something.
‘Things are about as complicated as it’s possible to be,’ Simone says.
‘Yeah. I know.’
‘Is there something else complicated going on?’ Simone asks.
‘No,’ Lucy says, but she projects her voice. It’s too confident, too dismissive; she’s acting.
Hot, tender salty potatoes, insides fluffy. They eat with their hands. There’s a simplicity to the food that Simone, too, finds she has missed. When cooking was cooking.
‘Had things become complicated before Texas?’ she presses.
